What many commentators have missed is that the Bostock opinion provides the basis for the argument that single-sex bathrooms violate Title VII. //

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the six-justice majority. He established a simple “rule” for when sex discrimination occurs under Title VII: if changing the sex of an employee would change the employer’s decision, then the employer has violated Title VII. //

This opinion has been lauded by the left and some on the right as an important step forward for gay and trans rights. What the Bostock cheerleaders who love the decision for its surface-level results don’t realize is the profound difference between a legislative policy change and a judicial policy change. “Legislation” from the courts carries the baggage of the reasoning used to achieve its result, and the contents inside can be volatile and dangerous when the courts finally get around to unzipping them.

Gorsuch’s rule creates problems because it lacks a limiting principle. What many commentators have missed is that the Bostock opinion already provides the basis for the argument that single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms violate Title VII. Even further, Bostock provides the basis for the argument that it is a violation of Title VII to enforce sexual harassment policies that are mandatory under Title VII. //

Bostock demonstrates the bad consequences of a judge’s unacknowledged assumptions about philosophy, theology, and other big ideas. In Gorsuch’s justification-free assumption that same-sex and opposite-sex attraction are literally the “same thing,” he has provided no guideline for how the actions of men and women can ever be distinguished sufficiently to keep women, like those in the locker room example, safe from a man intruding into places like their showers and exposing himself.

What would the solution be to correct for this? Would it be an arbitrary redefinition of some actions as inherently different when men and women do them, but not others that Gorsuch wants to enforce equality for? Would it be a standard that finds no difference between male and female sexual attraction to men, but does find an inherent difference between a man and a woman seeing women nude? //

Justice Samuel Alito described Gorsuch’s appeal to textualism, and the claim that he was reading Title VII as it was written and nothing more, as akin to a pirate ship flying a false flag to get away with plunder. Such a self-serving use of official power for personal policy goals, as would be demonstrated by the Supreme Court scrambling to find asymmetries between men and women only where it would produce a patchwork of desired results, does sound like something a pirate would do.